The Memory Wall

by Lev AC Rosen

  “This ain’t working!” Elkana shouts. She’s being swarmed, too, and so is Reunne. Severkin tries running into the clay pits.

  “Let’s just get the Spear and get out!” he shouts. Reunne and Elkana follow him, Elkana letting off bursts of fire now and then, trying to keep the flies down.

  The clay pits are slippery and wet. The floor is ankle deep with gray water, and beneath that, the clay underfoot squelches. All around them, mud-fly nests rise from the ground like organ pipes, coating the walls, the columns the dwarves had put up, the machines they used to harvest the mud. Carts, sieves, conveyor belts, all misshapen, coated in thick tubes of clay like armor.

  “She said she put it in a nest,” Severkin says, trying to swat more of the insects away. They bite his hands and neck, every bit of exposed skin. He can feel himself growing tired with pain.

  “So which nest?” Elkana shouts, blasting more of the insects with fire.

  They try to see through the swarms of bugs and the darkness, but not even Severkin’s night vision can see past the flies. They try climbing some of the nests, but the tubes fall away in their hands, and more mud flies stream out of them, angry and buzzing.

  They take different forms—the dwarf shadows again, and the shapes of giant flies—but always in a swarm, always delivering the feeling of a thousand needles to the face and hands. Elkana has to stop throwing fire to cast her few healing spells on herself, Reunne, and Severkin.

  Severkin sees a glint in the darkness only because he’s turned his head upward, hoping the flies won’t sting his eyes that way. It’s at the top of one of the largest nests—a thick column of pipes as tall as a house, and on top, a pointed roof that shines slightly at the peak.

  “There!” he shouts, and points. Elkana lets loose a blossom of fire, to clear out the flies for a moment in hopes of seeing the object clearly. But in the dark, all they can see is a metal point.

  “How can we get up there?” Reunne shouts. “I can’t climb it with my spear—the clay is too soft.”

  “And I can’t climb it with my hands,” Severkin says. They’ve clustered around the base, and Elkana has put a ring of fire around them. The smoke seems to keep the flies away better than the actual fire. But outside the ring, the strange dwarven silhouettes wait, something between a swarm and an army.

  “What about that?” Elkana asks, pointing at an old machine. It looks to be a large metal grate on a wheel, designed to scoop the clay up and hold it in the air to drain it. Two handles wind the grate—like a platform—up or down around a central bar, like an orbit. But it clearly needs to be hand-wound now, the engines all long dead.

  “If I stood on that and leapt,” Reunne says, “I think I’d be able to grab it and tear it down, yes.”

  “All right, then,” Elkana says, and hurls a fireball at the grate. The clay nests embedded in it shatter, and it creaks loose.

  “You’ll need to hold the grate just right,” Reunne says. “Otherwise it won’t be high enough.”

  “Let’s do it,” Severkin says. He rushes forward, the flies swarming him like a clinging rain. Reunne jumps onto the grate, and Elkana and Severkin stand on either side of it, where the handles are.

  “Now!” Reunne shouts, and both Severkin and Elkana turn the handles on their sides. They turn slowly, grinding through decades of old mud and rust, groaning against Severkin and Elkana’s efforts. The flies sting at his fingers as Severkin turns, and the blood runs over his hands, making them slippery.

  “Careful,” Reunne says. “Almost there. No, too far, back!” Severkin switches direction, winding the platform back toward the top of its orbit. “There,” Reunne says, and he holds the handle in place, even as it strains to go back down. He hears a clang from above him and feels the platform push back, and he lets go. He looks up, and through the fog of flies he can see Reunne dive for the Spear and grab it, pulling it down and into the muddy nests with her.

  And suddenly the insects stop.

  They’re still there, buzzing and biting, but their intelligence seems to be gone. They take no shapes, and their bites become less strategic, less frequent. Severkin runs over to where Reunne has landed in the mud, the Spear below her. She lies there on her stomach, and for a moment, he thinks she’s dead, but when he kneels beside her, she shifts and rolls over, the Spear clutched in her hands. It’s not as big as he thought it would be, only the size of both his hands together.

  “You all right?” he asks. Elkana runs over and puts up another circle of fire, but this one is weaker, Severkin notices, the flames lower.

  “I’m fine,” Reunne says.

  “Then let’s get out of here,” Severkin says, and pulls her up out of the clay. They run for the arch, and the flies don’t follow when they leave the clay pits.

  When they’re safely away from the nests, and the buzzing is just in their imagination, not their ears, they stop and catch their breath. Reunne is coated in clay, a paler gray against her blue-gray skin. It covers her armor and hair, too, so she looks like a living statue.

  “That was unexpected,” Severkin says. “I never thought flies would be such a problem.” He looks at his hand, which is bubbling with red spots as if diseased. He wonders if Reunne isn’t better off coated in clay.

  “I can take care of the bites,” Elkana says. “Just give me a moment ta meditate.” Severkin nods, and Elkana sits and starts quietly chanting. Severkin and Reunne walk a little way off.

  “Can I see it?” Severkin asks. Reunne pulls the Spear out of her bag, where she must have put it as they ran. It looks exactly like the drawing she’d shown him—it even gleams, despite having been stuck in the mud all those years. She hands the Spear to him. It feels cool in his hand, but nothing happens. “I thought, touching it…I’d feel that…that mind thing Sindry talked about,” he says.

  “According to records, she had it in her home for a while,” Reunne says. “I think it takes a few days to kick in.” She pauses, peels some of the clay from her face. “But I can tell you what you’re thinking without it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You’re wondering how you can convince me to let you take it to Rorth, instead of letting me take it to Elega.”

  Severkin smirks. “Maybe,” he says.

  “You don’t need to convince me,” Reunne says. “After today…that place. I don’t think the gray elves are much better, but they have to be better than that.”

  “Well…,” Severkin says. “Yeah. That went easier than I expected.”

  “Just tell them you grabbed it from the nest—don’t say I turned it over to you.”

  “Are you sure? You could get Rorth to honor you in some way.”

  Reunne shakes her head. “Your being honored is enough for me. I’m proud of you.”

  Severkin feels his skin warm at that, and not just from the fly bites. He looks at Reunne, the wrinkles in her face highlighted by the clay she couldn’t scrape off, and he wants to say a hundred things, but knows he can’t, and instead just says “Thanks.”

  “All right,” Elkana says, coming over. “Line up fer Doctor Elkana’s magical disease-ridding cure-all.”

  Severkin and Reunne look at each other and chuckle, and then Elkana raises her hands and Severkin can feel all the poisons leaving his body like rising steam.

  NICK WAKES up late, his ears still buzzing with the sound of the mud flies. There’s no smell of burning food, so he assumes Dad is also sleeping in. Nick’s stomach is rumbling, so he gets up to go downstairs for breakfast before turning on the game. As he descends, he makes a list in his head of what he needs to do today, a new item for each step he takes down the carpeted staircase: finish all his homework so he can go to GamesCon tomorrow, play as much of the game as possible so that if there are spoilers he’ll be past them already, convince Mom through the game to come home.

  In the kitchen, he pours himself water then gets out a bowl for cereal.

  “Nick, could you come in here for a sec?” Dad calls from the dining room.
Nick finishes pouring the cereal, adds milk to it, then walks into the dining room, eating his breakfast. His father is dressed, clean, and clearly had been lying in wait. He sits at the center of the table, on the long end. Nick sits across from him. There’s a plain manila folder on the table in front of Dad. It’s as thick as Nick’s history textbook. To Dad’s right is Mom’s old shoebox.

  “We need to talk,” Dad says. His tone is serious without being angry. Nick’s brain races over things he could be in trouble for: the one that leaps to mind is talking to Mom about breaking out. Did Dad overhear it as he got close? Nick eats a spoonful of cereal as calmly as he can, and swallows. “Your mother doesn’t want me sharing all this,” Dad says, laying hands on the manila folder as though it’s a bible. “But…I don’t think it’s fair to you anymore. She’s not coming home,” he says, and Nick takes another bite of cereal, willing himself not to contradict his father out loud. “So, I think you should know why she’s there. But please, don’t tell her you know all this, okay?”

  Nick nods cautiously. “What are you telling me?”

  “I’m going to tell you about your grandfather,” Dad says. Nick puts his bowl down on the table, as it’s suddenly too cold to keep holding. He doesn’t want to eat any more, anyway. He thinks about leaning forward, arms a triangle on the tablecloth, sucking the information out of his father, but finds himself instead leaning back into the formal plank of his dining room chair. Dad reaches into the shoebox and pulls out an old photo of a smiling white guy. The image is all sepia, the background paneled wood. It’s Grandpa. Nick takes it and looks at it a moment before putting it down next to his cereal.

  “So tell me,” Nick says.

  Dad shakes his head and snorts, like it’s funny. “It doesn’t sound like a big thing when you tell the story,” he says, and looks up. He has an expression like one Nick sometimes imagines he must have when he looks at his mother’s empty chair in the kitchen. “It happened the night the wall fell. She said she was out walking, you remember?”

  Nick nods.

  “And you know your grandfather was sick—he had Alzheimer’s. Early, too. But he was older than your mother is now. Ten years in. Your mom was doing all she could to complete her education and take care of him, and all she wanted was to leave. It was hard for her, Nick. If she did get what she wanted—if she was allowed to leave—she didn’t know what would happen to her father. There were some facilities…nothing nice. But her father refused to even admit he was sick. People realized, of course. Which meant the government knew. She was terrified that one day she’d get to travel, but when she came back he’d have vanished, having been taken away or just having wandered off.

  “But that night had been the worst. Her father had forgotten her. Had woken up from a nap, come into the kitchen, and not known who she was. He didn’t know who he was, either—he was somewhere else in time, in his mind. Your mother thinks he thought he was a young university student again, and that she was…a girl he’d met at a party the night before. He was in his underwear, and he walked up to her—she was reading at the table—and started rubbing her shoulders. Then his hands went lower, and he started…” Dad fumbles for words, but Nick knows what he means. The few bites of cereal he had are congealing in his stomach. He looks at the cereal left in his bowl, which is now so soggy that there’s not much milk visible. Just glue made of cereal.

  “Anyway,” Dad continues, “he started groping her. And when she tried to push him off, tell him who she was, he just laughed. He thought it was a game. He put his arms around her and tried to…She fended him off. And she left him there, alone in his underwear. That’s what had happened before she was out walking.”

  Nick stares at the manila envelope and tries to process what his father has told him. It seems like a campfire ghost story. He wonders how many sheets of paper are in the folder. Two hundred? His history textbook has at least three hundred pages, but those pages are slick and thin, more like ink poured into the shapes of words and left to dry than actual paper.

  “Do you understand?” Dad asks.

  “Mom is afraid of molesting me,” Nick says, nodding. It sounds ridiculous out loud.

  “Not exactly,” Dad begins, but Nick looks up at his father and starts to laugh.

  “That’s all?” he asks. “Mom is afraid she’ll forget who I am and, what, go all cougar on me?” He shakes his head. “That’s not going to happen,” he says. He looks his father straight in the eye and smiles, because he knows he’s about to win with the next question: “Do you think that’s going to happen?”

  His father is silent, and Nick feels his body swell, a too-full-balloon feeling of triumph.

  “This is your mom’s file,” Dad says instead. “All her tests. All the doctors’ reports. I think you should read it.”

  Nick stares at the folder as Dad pushes it across the table. It’s so full, it could pop open any moment and throw pages around the room like hail.

  “I have to do my homework,” Nick says, feeling his smile fade. “I won’t have time tomorrow, with GamesCon. I’ll read it later.” He stares at it, halfway between him and his father. A manila dam, holding back a flood. Nick scoots back from the table and laughs again.

  “Mom’s not going to molest me,” he says, taking his bowl. “And we both know it. I’m going to get her out of there.”

  “Nick, you can’t get—”

  “Homework,” Nick says, and leaves the room before the conversation can start again. It was a whirlpool, that conversation. He and Dad kept circling and circling, going farther down, but nothing ever happened. No one got swallowed up and vanished with a pop, like when you get caught in a whirlpool in the game. That makes so much more sense, Nick thinks. Vanishing with a pop.

  SEVERKIN, ELKANA, and Reunne enter Wellhall through the dwarven passages, the city outlined in torches that roar like hearthfire and light up the underground skyline like fireflies. Their skin is still sticky with clay and sweat, but at least the bites are gone and they don’t itch. Severkin feels the weight of the Spear in a bag tied to his belt, but it’s a good weight, like a medal—the weight of triumph.

  “You sure you don’t want to come with us and deliver this to Rorth?” he asks Reunne. “There’s going to be a lot of thanks.”

  Reunne shakes her head. “I’m going to have to explain to Elega how I lost the final piece to you. I’ll say it was sly trickery or something like that.” She shrugs.

  “Oh, aye, play in ta the gray elf stereotypes,” Elkana says.

  “It will convince her. That’s the important part,” Reunne says. “Besides, I really want to take a bath.” She pulls at more dried flecks of clay on her face. “I’ll walk you as far as Bilrost Hall, though.”

  Dwarves stare at them as they walk past, and for a while, Severkin thinks they must know what he has in his bag, how they’re here to save the kingdom. But then he realizes it’s not that, it’s them. Two gray elves and a troll. People shy away from them, put their hands on the satchels of money they have around their waists, to make sure they’re still there. It’s like everywhere else he’s been, except the overcity. Maybe, he thinks, he can actually make a home in the overcity, where people don’t stare. They’ll probably give him a mansion with what he’s about to do.

  At the Hall, Reunne waves them goodbye.

  “I’ll come get you as soon as we’re done,” Severkin tells her. “There are some cities we haven’t seen yet. You’ll come with us, right?”

  “Of course,” Reunne says, reaching out and rumpling his hair. “We’re family.”

  “Great,” Severkin says, throwing a look at Elkana. “So, we’ll see you in a bit—maybe you could come up to watch them use the weapon and put the giants to sleep.”

  “I’ll try,” Reunne says. “If Elega lets me. I’d better get to see her, though. The quicker I get the being-screamed-at part over with, the quicker I can make it topside.”

  “See you soon, then,” Severkin says. Reunne nods and walks off, heading b
ack to the main square. Severkin and Elkana begin hiking up the stairs to the overcity.

  “She said we were family,” he says to Elkana.

  “Aye, I was there. I heard it,” Elkana says with a roll of her eyes. “But she was probably speaking metaphorically, unless you think you’re still young enough to be adopted?”

  Severkin barks a laugh. “I suppose it depends on how much older she is.”

  “You’re too old to need a mommy.”

  Severkin shrugs. “I wouldn’t know. I never had one.”

  They walk up the huge stairway slowly, stopping to look at some of the stalls closer to the surface. When they finally make it to the overcity, Elkana suggests a celebratory drink, but Severkin tells her no, not until they’ve handed over the Spear—then there’ll be many celebratory drinks, which Elkana agrees to.

  They flash their badges at the guards and go into the main hall, where Rorth is yelling at Izzy, her squirrel ponytail bobbing with repressed laughter.

  “Tell that shriveled crone I’d sooner strap fruit bowls to the heads of my soldiers than throw away coin on these flimsy things she’s calling helmets.”

  Elkana bursts out laughing, and Rorth, Ind, Siffon, and Izzy turn, noticing them for the first time. Izzy winks.

  “Ah!” Rorth says, beckoning them closer with his hands. “Tell me you have the Spear.”

  “We have the Spear,” Severkin says, taking it out of his satchel. In the light, it gleams a dull pewter. Ind rushes forward and grabs it from Severkin’s hands.

  “Forget that message,” Rorth says to Izzy, a smile rippling over his face. “Tell her we have the Spear and the Staff, and we hope she will bring us the Hammer as quickly as possible so we can put the giants to rest. Quicker than you’ve ever gone.” Rorth waves a hand and Izzy is out the door in a shot.

  Ind has been studying the Spear carefully, turning it over in his hands, studying the blade edges.